IWR1642: How to start sensor from script?

I'm writing a Python script to initialize and start the sensor, but nothing happens when I send the configuration file to the device. I'm connecting to the UART COM port with baud rate 115200, and I'm using the default configuration file from the People Counting lab. I read each line of the configuration file, then convert it to bytes (UTF-8 encoding) and write it to the UART COM port, but this does not start the sensor. What am I missing to start the sensor? Is there a different encoding I should use?